Ten of Russia’s ten largest companies have moved or are moving operations from Moscow to the underdeveloped eastern regions of the country as the Kremlin attempts to boost regional development and reduce the concentration of the biggest firms in the capital, according to a table posted on X by Russian commentator Dmitrii Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov described the shift as a quiet but large-scale industrial reorganisation.

For most of the 1990s observers described Russia as being made up of two parts: Moscosw and everywhere else. Russia’s leading companies tend to house their HQs in the capital and as taxes are charged whereever a company’s administration is located that made the. Russian capital far richer than the rest of the companies as taxes were charged on the headquarters in Moscow, not on operations in the regions where their oil, gas, metal and diamonds are actually mined. Now the Kremlin is trying to undo some of that anomoly.

The table lists Gazprom as having moved to St Petersburg in 2021 and RusHydro to Krasnoyarsk in 2025. It puts Rosneft's move to Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok and Russian Railways' move to Dobrograd in Vladimir region at about 2027. Six of the ten entries point east. The entries do not all describe headquarters relocations: Inter RAO, for example, set up HR and call-centre operations in Ivanovo, Saratov and Orel, according to United24 Media.

Where Russia's largest companies are moving from Moscow. Staff and turnover are company-wide totals, not the number of people relocating. Source: table published by Dmitrii Kuznetsov on X, October 2026; dollar figures at the CBR rate of RUB83.4839/$.

In 2021, President Vladimir Putin called for state companies' head offices to shift to the regions, according to Neftegaz.ru. On September 23, Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov presented Putin with a separate plan naming eight state holdings for relocation, including RZD, Aeroflot, Russian Post, Transneft, Rosseti, Rosneft, Inter RAO and Zarubezhneft. United24 Media reported that their corporate networks cover about 250 entities and 270,000 Moscow jobs; the ministry described moving parts of their operations, not necessarily all headquarters or jobs.

The numbers moving so far are smaller than the headline staff counts suggest. RusHydro took over 40% of its Moscow office staff, including all its executives, to Krasnoyarsk, about 900 people, at a cost of more than RUB11bn ($132mn), Neftegaz.ru reported when the move was completed on July 1, 2025. Russian Post has moved more than 1,000 IT staff to Tatarstan, and RZD plans to send about 2,000 workers to Vladimir region.

“No one is heading west,” commentator Denis Kuznetsov wrote in a social media post. Gazprom and United Shipbuilding Corporation, which went to St Petersburg, are the exceptions on his list.